What you learn will empower you to make the right decisions in your online marketing and achieve the highest possible online visibility—turning the web into an incredible customer acquisition tool for your business.

Local SEO uses search engines like Google and business directories like Yelp, Superpages, Qype & TouchLocal. Millions of local customers use these services every day to find the best local businesses in their area (click to see Comparison of Online Local Directory Audience Figures).

First Things First

Before you go ahead and start chasing links, there’s a lot of up-front work needed on your website to ensure that you’re able to get the best possible results, especially if you want to rank within the local pack listings.

To begin with, you’ll want to capture any low-hanging fruit by getting in touch with your existing customer base and see if they’d be interested in leaving you a review. You could incentivize them for their time (maybe a discount, etc.).

Another great tip that I picked up from Greg Gifford‘s recent talk at BrightonSEO was to create a page on your website that gives instructions to your customers on exactly how they can review your business (i.e. yourwebsite.com/review-us/).

On-page SEO for local businesses conforms to some pretty old school SEO tactics. There’s quite a large weighting towards the on-page content in the local search listings, so it’s important that, where possible, you squeeze the most value out of your content.